As she made her way down the staircase, she reached into the pocket of her shorts, pulled out a rumpled piece of paper towel, and wiped sweat off her forehead. This humidity was beginning to make her feel claustrophobic, as if she were wrapped in a wet sheet and couldn’t catch her breath. The other day, Dale had dismissed her environmental concerns and claimed the weather was just part of the natural cycle of things, a comment she’d interpreted to mean he’d become a Republican. Dale didn’t have real political convictions and never had; he had social ambitions. When they’d met this afternoon, he’d described in detail the restaurant he’d invested in, using words like “tasteful” and “quality” about three hundred times. Caroline had obviously weaned him off “classy,” but the echo of it was there in everything he said. If you didn’t know better, you might find this eagerness to fit in almost touching.

She decided to unload the dishwasher, a mindless chore that was infinitely less odious at this hour than in the clear light of morning and always made her feel she’d accomplished something.

Since the day they moved into the house, Jane had hated the kitchen, the big rambling room facing the shady backyard with the tongue-and-groove wainscoting and the bleached pine cabinets and the long cool pantry with the worn butcher block countertops. Everyone who came into the house fell in love with the kitchen immediately, which was, in itself, enough to make her look at it with doubt. Loving a room like this was so obvious and easy, like a politician approving of tax cuts. Like the way people reacted to her friend Rachel’s thirteen-year-old son. How unchallenging to love blond-haired, six foot, athletic, polite, brilliant Joshua. What about loving a person, or a room, whose virtues you had to hunt for a little bit?

For starters, she didn’t like to cook. Not because she had any political objections to women slaving away over a stove—the lives of most of the women she knew revolved around food anyway, cooking it, eating it, or lusting after it through a fog of self-deprivation—but because it required too much patience and precision, qualities she’d never been able to nurture in herself. Thomas was the cook in their family, and a brilliant cook, too, although at times she found herself wondering if all the care he threw into cutting and slicing vegetables and reducing sauces wasn’t just more passive-aggression.